EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

> Because they had built the tsunami-wall to spec.

If you're referring to the Onagawa plant, one engineer (Yanosuke Hirai) pushed for the height of the wall to be increased beyond the original spec:

> A nuclear plant in a neighboring area, meanwhile, had been built to withstand the tsunamis. A solitary civil engineer employed by the Tohoku Electric Power Company knew the story of the massive Jogan tsunami of the year 869, because it had flooded the Shinto shrine in his hometown. In the 1960s, the engineer, Yanosuke Hirai, had insisted that the Onagawa Nuclear Power Station be built farther back from the sea and at higher elevation than initially proposed—ultimately nearly fifty feet above sea level. He argued for a seawall to surpass the original plan of thirty-nine feet. He did not live to see what happened in 2011, when forty-foot waves destroyed much of the fishing town of Onagawa, seventy-five miles north of Fukushima. The nuclear power station—the closest one in Japan to the earthquake’s epicenter—was left intact. Displaced residents even took refuge in the power plant’s gym.

https://www.economist.com/open-future/2019/12/06/were-design...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#20...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanosuke_Hirai

The uranium reserves does not help when a winter storm rolls through and grid usage spikes. That is "emergency reserves" or the completely black and white "must work 100% or completely unusable" statement you led with.

Take a look at France. They generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.

What they have done is that they have outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors and rely on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production both inside France and their neighbors grids. Because their nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity and too little when it is actually needed.

Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.

> BEV will make the storage problem worse because they consume more in winter and you can't tell people how to use their own cars.

I don't think you quite get how the grid works? BEVs are like the ultimate consumers for a renewable grid since they can utilize surpluses matching supply and demand.

Everyone I know with a BEV and an hourly contract times their charging to perfection to reduce costs.

They are of course willing to pay a premium to charge now if their schedule demands it, but that is a tiny tiny subset of the household BEV fleet.

I mean, yeah. Much cleaner than coal and much more flexible than nuclear.

60% of that energy is lost as waste heat and doesn't need replaced as we decarbonise and electrify.

For already developed nations predictions are for electricity to double but energy use to halve at the same time as they electrify end uses.

> at least in Germany nobody wants to have a nuclear waste storage in their backyard

Hello, I live in Germany. You can use my backyard free of charge so long as I get a free Geiger counter, thank you!

I'd genuinely be honored to play such an important role in decarbonising Germany's energy supply. Watching the carbon intensity per kWh on electricitymap.com as we creep towards winter is frankly depressing. (I didn't know this site yet last year, so this is the first time I see the dynamics in action.) The coal plant also never turns off, even during negative prices. I presume it takes too long to fire back up and so there's always >100 grams CO2e for every little kWh that 82 million Germans use. The wind turbines / solar panels need to turn off to make space on the grid for the coal plant when there's oversupply. That's what the Germans were made to vote for in fear when electing to shut their nuclear plants earlier than coal. It's like banning airplanes and having everyone drive cars instead due to a national fear of flying, not having considered the safety records of each method. It's so crazy to me as a Dutch immigrant who's new to these people's politics. Anyway, back to storage

I don't see the problem with inert waste under the ground and a good detection system, at least for a few centuries. There's challenges in how to explain the danger to a generation that doesn't speak any of our languages anymore (in 500 years, someone's gonna need to replace the sign), or who lost any translators we've built (imagining some apocalypse, say in 5000 years), but there's research on that as well and it's not an argument why we couldn't find a good storage site for the next century while we deal with this energy transition

> the other part of the answer is Chornobyl - and for the same 'not in my backyard' reason

And yet there are nuclear plants all over Europe! People who mind can already choose not to live near them. Expand capacity at those sites and let's go